Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Are our Homilists “actively participating?"

Well, someone has to ask this question now and again
occasionally. Being long of tooth and a born curmudgeon, I’ll take the
blowback. But I don’t expect much to actually come my way in this life, at
least.

To be brutally frank, I’m done, exhausted with, recoil from
even reading or hearing this clumsy phrase, “active participation.” Expiating
it in Latin ain’t any better, just sayin’.

I’ve never suffered from this malaise personally since
crossing the Tiber over four decades ago. I don’t carry a bag of angry cats
that, when I walk through the doors of a church, I display as a reason not to
take up my responsibility as a worshipper. If in a foreign parish and someone
announces a hymn or ordinary setting is to be sung now, I sing it. What else am
I supposed to do? I chose to come to church, to worship, in the manner
prescribed and fully because I like God, quite a bit actually, and love Him as
Christ and enjoy the Spirit’s breath expelled that becomes both text and song
in that most sublime of arts.

I noticed young Mr. Yanke’s article published today just
before this one, I also saw it on Fr. Keye’s FB entry, so this Fr. Gismondi’s
interview must be quite something. I’ll get around to it. Or maybe not.

Because, I’ve disavowed my own personal culpability for
other folks’ bag of cats that keep them from full engagement in the greatest
act, or drama that we humans can re-create that provides us with true succor
and hope in this despairing world.

Besides, if a groaner/moaner about the sorry state of “singing
in church” want’s to point a bony finger of indignation towards THE responsible
party, I direct them toward the guy in the alb and chasuble. If the
celebrant upon at the “presider’s” chair cannot or won’t manage to intone the “In
Nomine Patris….” or any other orations as he is virtually disciplined to do in
Musicam Sacram, well, I’d be surprised if the entrance hymn sung prior to that
moment was lustily taken up by the congregation. (And have all of us who
frequent here also had the recurrent thought “Thank God for the choir, bless
their hearts” for taking up that slack, such as they are!”?) Because the
equation of that mandated wisdom from 1967 (!) is pure simplicity in action, a physics
truism even- for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction!

If Father, OTOH, chooses to lead and no matter how humbly or
magnificently he chants his proper portions, and the response he receives is
the chirping of crickets, Father should grab the processional cross and clear
the temple of the rabble who are there for “other” purposes, lock the doors
(keeping a server or two) and sing a private Mass honorably.

And, at long last, to the point of the title of this little
rant, John I, 1. “In the beginning there was the WORD…..” The homily remains
almost a sacrosanct vestigial remnant of a time when people actually had
something to say to one another. Whether it was in antiquity with Cicero or St.
Paul, St. Francis or Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards or John Adams, or in our
lifetimes with names like Churchill, King Jr., Sheen, Ghandi, and their ilk,
the act of one inspired soul’s words crafted with conviction and purpose to
remind large gatherings of other souls’ to listen, to savor, to digest and to
transform themselves through those noble thoughts bravely spoken seems to have
all but disappeared from our ambos and pulpits.

From what I know of the historical Jesus, he wasn’t a song
and dance sort of guy. He didn’t attract crowds of listeners like Cagney in a
top hat crooning “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” In the current cycle of Gospel
readings we are reminded again and again of the unimaginable power of the
story, the parable, the spoken word from a sage to the masses.

So, if we musicians must fret about something as it seems we
must always, let us worry about how we can gently and firmly remind our
clerical brothers that we choose our repertoire for a reason, we rehearse it
thoroughly for a reason, we literally pray that it be taken up or listened to
with intent that is pure and unabated by banality or poor improvisation and
padding.

Just as every Sanctus sung is literally prefaced with the
anamnesis that we are conjoined with choirs of angels IN THAT VERY MOMENT,
every homilist ought to re-approach the ambo after the gospel reading as if he
is to give the Sermon on the Mount.

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